THERE are stories to tell about Rochdale. It is home to the Rochdale Pioneers who launched the worldwide co-operative movement and thus to a central place in the traditions of socialism.

It is a community gutted by the gales of neoliberal capitalism, the evisceration of unconstrained profit-seeking wrought in the desolation of the built environment and the poverty of many of its people.

But that is not, or at least not mainly, the story of Rochdale’s parliamentary by-election, due on February 29.